Authorative drive is what makes software more inclusive. It can focus the resources and attention where its needed,

Where a particular groups think it’s needed.

Let’s take some examples. In the linux world, there are multiple DEs, with different GUIs and approaches on how to interact with a computer. People used to the windows look might feel better and be more productive in KDE, while people who are more used to phones might prefer GNOME. There are DEs that are very lightweight with resources, so that people with older machines aren’t left out, and there are people who don’t even like DEs at all, who might prefer something like i3. In the end, everyone can have something to run on their machines, and which they will feel more comfortable with, instead of a particular group of people deciding how someone should interact with a computer, and people having to use it the way they want, whether they like it or not.

Doesnt mean it has to be monolithic/monoculture. but a single product that serves 80% of everyones wants and desires is a better, superior product to one that tries to cater to and serve 100% to each, different individual.

I agree with that, and maybe we’re talking about different things? The kind of diversity I mention is multiple projects aiming at 80% of different people, but coexisting.

Just a reminder to take the data in that site with a grain of salt. I used to share them a lot, but then decided to read more about their methodology, and turns out it’s mostly a black box, so they may be subject to several kinds of biases, and we can’t even know. For example, we don’t know which sites use their analytics and if there’s a geographical bias. We also don’t know how their scripts work and how the data is collected from devices. It would be nice if we had more sources of marketshare data to compare

But how much is too much? Diversity is a great thing for people, makes technology less authoritative and more inclusive.

I use several, but the ones that I consider to be basic functions are caffeine, tray icons, places status indicator, removable drive menu and extended volume indicator. That last one is a nice example of my frustration, because it can’t be installed on the current gnome version anymore, and having to open settings to switch my audio output is terrible. Every distro upgrade have been the same experience, and I lose some functionality

Long time Gnome user here: I like the general Gnome simplicity of use and workflow and got used to it, but I’m really tired of having to install extensions for very basic things, and of it messing all my extensions on each version upgrade, so I have to reinstall everything. I started experimenting with KDE, and looking forward to cosmic.

Content is also getting heavier, but both things aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s more objective to compare modern software, instead of older and newer ones. Before reddit created obstacles for third-party apps, they were famous for being much lighter than the official one, while doing the same (some even had more features). Now, if we compare lemmy to reddit, it’s also much lighter, while providing a very similar experience. Telegram has a desktop app that does everything the web version does, and more, while lighter on resources. Most linux distros will work fine with far less hardware resources than windows. If you install lineageos on an older phone, it will perform better than the stock rom, even while using a newer aosp version. If you play a video on youtube, and the same one on vlc, vlc will do the same with less resources. If you use most sites with and without content blockers, the second one will be lighter, while not losing anything important.

I could go on and on, but that’s enough examples. There is a bloat component to software getting heavier, and not everything can be explained by heavier content and more features.

That’s not bloat, that’s people running more apps than ever.

Not necessarily. People used to write text documents while looking for references on the internet, listening to music and chatting with friends at the same time in 2010, and even earlier, but the same use case (office suite+browser+music payer+chat app) takes much more resources today, with just a small increase in usability and features.

Bloat is a complicated thing to discuss, because there’s no hard definition of it, and each person will think about it in a different way, so what someone can consider bloat, someone else may not, and we end up talking about different things. You’re right that hardware resources have been increasing in a slower rate, and it may force some more optimizations, but a lot of software are still getting heavier, without bringing new functionalities.

To add to your comment, there’s also the corp’s willingness to make things more precarious, as long as it gets cheaper to run and people keep consuming, so the situation might be even worse. In your uber example, they could simply not care for the 5%, stop providing them the service and go full self-driving.

First of all, 350MB is a drop in a bucket

People don’t run just a single app in their machines. If we triple ram usage of several apps, it results in a massive increase. That’s how bloat happens, it’s a cumulative increase on everything. If we analyze single cases, we could say that they’re not that bad individually, but the end result is the necessity for a constant and fast increase in hardware resources.

It sure is. I’m running ferdium at this very moment with 3 chat apps open, and it consumes almost a gigabyte for something that could take just a few megabytes.

Now let me present you the laptops with 2GB of RAM still being sold here in Brazil: https://www.zoom.com.br/notebook/notebook-multilaser-legacy-cloud-pc132-intel-atom-x5-z8350-14-2gb-windows-10-bluetooth

Do you have access to a computer with an sd card reader? I believe the best and safest thing to do is to connect it to a computer, create disk image from it and try ro use a data recovery tool in the image file.

Edit: if you only have the phone, maybe you could try looking for apps to copy a disk image from the sd card and to recover data or try using some terminal emulator or one of those apps that install a linux distro inside android to use the dd command and then use testdisk and photorec tools. I recommend the second option, because the tools are open sourc and well tested

I expected to see risc v processors first in embedded devices, like routers and cameras, then moving to smart devices, like tvs and smartwatches, then to phones and then desktops. But looks like there won’t be a clear line, and things will come concurrently.

One of the great advantages of software distributed with the source code is the flexibility to move to different platforms and architectures. I wonder if moving to a snap/flatpak model will change this flexibility in the future.

I don’t have a full answer, so I won’t try to answer it right now, but I will surely think about it during the next days.

I don’t choose. To continue living is just the default, and time keeps passing, so I’m alive by inaction…

You can replace in the sense of making new releases on the gpl license. The mit license only requires to keep the original copyright notice. I changed the original comment to avoid this confusion, thanks for pointing that out.

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The original code never stops being free, but the code incorporated into a new project will be, so it’s a misleading term to people unfamiliar with open source licensing, that may think the license somehow expires. Even the fsf doesn’t use such terminology. They use reciprocal and nonreciprocal, because it translates the idea that gpl-like licenses create a relationship of reciprocity, and bsd-like ones create a relationship of non reciprocity.

Thats really interesting, I didn’t know that concept existed in foss licenses.